by Miriam Pawel
Each evening as marchers straggled into another town, they were greeted with cheers as they paraded by candlelight to a local hall for dinner and a performance by the Teatro Campesino. Valdez had written the “Plan de Delano,” modeled on Emiliano Zapata’s “Plan de Ayala,” the 1911 manifesto of the Mexican revolutionary. In his deep, resonant voice, Valdez read the fiery declaration in Spanish and English each night:
This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements . . . We are tired of words, of betrayals, of indifference. We shall be heard . . . We are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause . . . We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live . . . Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve . . . Our pilgrimage is the match that will light our cause for all farmworkers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have done.
Just as Zapata’s forces had carried images of the Virgen de Guadalupe into battle, the pilgrims marched each day behind a banner with a portrait of the saint, the most important cultural symbol for Mexicans because, as the Plan de Delano proclaimed, “she is ours, all ours,16 patroness of the Mexican people.”
Whether they were practicing Catholics or cultural Catholics, Mexicans knew the story of the Virgen, who appeared in a vision to the peasant Juan Diego on a hill in Mexico City in 1531. The virgin mother was brown like the Indians, and she spoke gently to Juan Diego in his language, Nahuatl, at a time when the Spanish conquistadors treated the Aztecs like dirty savages. She commanded that a church be built in her name, and when the archbishop dismissed the peasant’s vision, the Virgen reappeared and supplied Juan Diego with an armful of red roses. He dropped the roses in front of the bishop, revealing an image of the saint imprinted on Diego’s cloak. That icon hangs in the basilica built on the spot where the Virgen appeared. Millions of pilgrims journey to the Mexico City shrine on her feast day, December 12, some traveling for weeks. Penitents often walk the final miles on their knees. Thousands line the road and offer refreshment, just as Mexicans throughout the San Joaquin Valley did for the farmworkers who marched to Sacramento in the spring of 1966. “The Virgin of Guadalupe is more Mexican than Catholic,”17 Chavez said. “She is our mother, and she’s Mexican.”
By harnessing the power of the Virgen, Chavez reached out and embraced the church, leaving its reluctant sentinels no choice but to return the gesture. Priests opened their doors, welcomed the penitents, and said mass in each new town. The church’s imprimatur conveyed safety, emboldening more people to join la causa, especially women. As the march wore on, the physical suffering enhanced the religious aspects. Limping along, Chavez stressed the value of the physical hardship and talked about the importance of admitting sin: “The penance part18 of it is, to me, the most important thing of the pilgrimage.”
Valdez watched the suffering, observed with a writer’s eye how Chavez endured pain and used that image for maximum advantage. After the first day, when both men’s feet were blistered from walking miles in work boots, Valdez switched to sneakers and urged Chavez to follow suit. Chavez declined. He saw the power of the suffering image, and he embraced it. He was sidelined with a swollen ankle, blisters, and fever for a day or two, then resumed the march, hobbling with a cane. “Every step19 was a needle,” he recalled.
Bill Kircher, the director of organizing for the AFL-CIO, did not know much about farm labor and had never talked to Chavez. But Kircher was a good Catholic who understood the appeal of penance, and a good organizer who grasped the potential of Cesar Chavez. Kircher put on old clothes20 and joined the march. He learned the words to the movement songs and went to mass every morning. After a few days, they arrived in a town where the local paper ran a story saying that AWOC and the AFL-CIO were boycotting the march. Kircher went ballistic and ordered his own reluctant union to participate. Kircher’s determination to demonstrate his organization’s commitment stemmed both from personal conviction and from a deep, decades-long animosity toward Walter Reuther and other top officials of the autoworkers union. Chavez became the beneficiary of that feud, as the leaders of the AFL-CIO and the UAW vied to prove themselves the farmworkers’ most loyal labor ally.
The UAW had donated a radio-telephone, and Terence Cannon rode in a truck with the primitive mobile phone to handle public relations for the march. The phone worked by calling operators, a different one as they moved from zone to zone, and Cannon got to know them all. Each day he typed up a statement and called reporters at all the national papers. The first week he had no bites beyond the local press. Then the New York Times picked up the story on March 25, 1966 (only the third time the paper had mentioned Chavez’s name—first when Reuther visited, then once in a boycott story). Cannon’s phone started to ring. In the towns where Chavez had struggled just a few years earlier to turn out a handful of people, they now showed up in droves.
The growers looked on with a mixture of bafflement, apprehension, and anger.
“The simple truth is that there is no strike in Delano,” Martin Zaninovich said once more to the annual meeting of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League in San Francisco on March 24, one week into the march. “More than 5,00021 of the people who regularly, year after year, picked our crops, stayed on the job. In fact, they picked the largest crop in history.” For a brief period, he acknowledged, the two unions “succeeded in frightening perhaps as many as 500 workers away from their jobs.” But within days, most had returned.
Zaninovich was the son of one of three brothers who had emigrated from Croatia and each started a Delano vineyard in the 1940s. His Jasmine Vineyard was far from the largest, but Zaninovich had quickly emerged as a leader among the grape growers. He had helped form a Delano group called the South Central Farmers Committee a few years earlier, anticipating a union drive. In January 1966, the committee leased an office at 1224 Jefferson Street on Delano’s east side—almost exactly one block over from the Chavez home on Kensington. Growers met daily to exchange information and plan strategy. Along with a handful of other growers, including his brother-in-law, Jack Pandol, Zaninovich became the public face of the employers. Pandol was frank and profane, Zaninovich more statesmanlike. Both were angry and confused by the attack not only on their often-precarious financial situation but also on their way of life.
On April 3, as the marchers arrived in Stockton, Chavez received a message that a lawyer for Schenley wanted to meet. First he thought the call a hoax. But Sidney Korshak, a well-known lawyer to mobsters, said he was empowered by the chairman of Schenley to negotiate as soon as possible. For Schenley, a multinational company with only a small fraction of its business in Delano, one small vineyard was jeopardizing the sale of dozens of major liquor labels. Schenley officials had proposed selling the vineyard, but Korshak suggested they could reap good publicity by signing a contract instead.
Chavez slept in the car as Hartmire drove him to Los Angeles. They met Korshak at his Beverly Hills home the next day, and after a minor skirmish about the role of the AFL-CIO in the pact, they had a deal. They signed a recognition agreement with contract negotiations to follow within sixty days. “Labor history was written22 here today,” said Kircher, who cosigned the agreement.
Chavez reached Cannon on the mobile phone, and he stood on top of a car and announced the news to the cheers of the marchers. Four years after he had moved to Delano with little more than a dream, Cesar Chavez was on the front page of the New York Times. Chavez sent a letter to boycott supporters to share the news—and told them to switch focus immediately to the giant DiGiorgio Corporation, the union’s next target.
The union had made sleeping arrangements23 for nine hundred people in Sacramento, in a gym, churches, and union halls. On Easter, the marchers crossed the Tower Bridge into Sacramento, the crowd so large it took almost an hour for the last person to cross. More than eight thousand cheering farmworkers and supporters massed in the park in front of the state Capitol. The originales, those who had marched the
whole way, had a special place of honor. Hartmire led the crowd in prayer. Chavez spotted Fred Ross, who had just joined the march, and called him up to the makeshift stage.
The union leader addressed the crowd only briefly. “It is well to remember that in defeat there must be courage, but also that in victory, there must be humility,” Chavez began. He thanked the many organizations that had lent support, and the farmworkers who had the courage to walk out on strike. Prolonged applause followed his introduction of the only person he thanked by name: “And I want to introduce to you someone, when we started organizing four years ago, in fact one of the very few people that thought that this could be done—my wife, Helen.”24
Governor Pat Brown had declined Chavez’s request to meet and spent Easter with his family at the Palm Springs home of Frank Sinatra. That only made the rally stronger. Chavez rejected the governor’s offer to meet the next morning. Sunday or not at all, he told Brown. My way or the highway, a hallmark of Chavez’s negotiating style that growers would soon see again and again.
The farmworkers had shown their strength, to the outside world and to themselves. They could walk through the heart of enemy territory in Delano, and they could rebuff the governor’s overtures. The Delano Record might report on its front page that the rally on the Capitol steps fanned “the flames of class struggle25 and suspicion and bitterness and hatred,” but the marchers had carried their message far beyond the parochial barriers of the valley: Farmworkers were no longer willing to be treated as second-class citizens.
“We are still in an age of symbols and heroes and so forth,” Chavez said in an interview, downplaying his own role. “For many years I was a farm worker, a migratory worker, and, well personally, and I’m being very frank, maybe it’s just a matter of trying to even the score,26 you know.”
Now that he was gaining national attention, Chavez took care to shape his own life story. He began to embellish his evolution as an organizer in small but pointed ways. The history melted into mythology, the better to draw people into la causa. In particular, Chavez recast two key junctures in his life—his decision to join the CSO, and his decision to leave.
When Chavez recounted how he became an organizer, he was still a farmworker, picking apricots, not a lumber handler. Where Fred Ross had been too late for the Chavez house meeting the first night and returned the following week night, Chavez massaged the facts to say he dodged Ross several times and made Helen cover for him, assuming Ross was a nosy sociologist studying the habits of Mexicans. Chavez erased his parents and family from the house meeting that night and replaced them with a bunch of rowdy friends he recruited to give Ross a hard time. He had told them he would give them a signal, Chavez said: when he switched his cigarette from one hand to the other, they were to drive Ross out. While in real life Ross brought an interpreter along, in Chavez’s version Ross spoke fluent and impressive Spanish. One detail remained true to the history: Ross was such a great organizer that Chavez was immediately impressed and ready to join the CSO.
Ross did his part to fuel the myth building. He invented a diary entry and told interviewers that when he went home that night he wrote: “I think I’ve found the guy I’ve been looking for.”
The end of Chavez’s account of the fateful meeting was equally fictional. The first thing Chavez asked Ross, according to the revised history, was, What will CSO do for farmworkers? If we get strong enough, Ross replied, we will form a union.
In his revisionist account of leaving the CSO, Chavez likewise altered the facts. Frustrated that the CSO helped middle-class Mexican Americans and ignored farmworkers, Chavez said, he decided to go off on his own and do the job. In fact, at the March 16, 1962, convention where he announced his resignation, the CSO adopted a program to help farmworkers. Chavez rejected the plan and believed he needed to organize on his own terms, reporting to no one and free to work in the way he thought best. He submitted his resignation letter on April 16.
As more national reporters began to express interest in where Cesar Chavez came from, he added one more significant detail to the evolving legend. He began to repeat that he quit CSO on his birthday, March 31, 1962. Not too many years later, that date would become an official union holiday.
Chapter 13
The First Big Test
It’s tough enough just fighting a company. Or it’s tough enough just fighting another union. But when the company and the union are working hand in glove, it’s a hard combination to beat.
As soon as Chavez announced the Schenley agreement, some marchers on the peregrinación tore up their boycott schenley signs and tossed them in the air. Others crossed out schenley and wrote in digiorgio.
DiGiorgio was not only the largest grower in California but also a symbol of corporate agricultural power. With ties to the Bank of America, offices in the hub of San Francisco’s business district, and a history of violently putting down labor strife in the fields, DiGiorgio offered Chavez an attractive villain.
The DiGiorgio empire1 had been built by Joseph DiGiorgio, who arrived in America as a fifteen-year-old Sicilian fruit peddler at the end of the nineteenth century and rose to run a multimillion-dollar food company. By 1966, his four nephews had taken over and expanded from vineyards, a winery, and a shipping and distribution network into canned goods and juices. DiGiorgio was the largest grape, pear, and plum grower in the United States. As with Schenley, only a small percentage of DiGiorgio’s business was directly affected by the strike. The company had been shifting more and more investments out of agriculture; only about 20 percent of DiGiorgio’s $100 million annual revenue came from farming. Most came from sales of well-known brands such as S&W Fine Foods and Treesweet. So the threatened boycott caused concern.
Robert DiGiorgio, one of Joseph’s nephews, had been trying to convince2 his partners to get out of the fields altogether. Farming was too perilous, dependent on factors outside the grower’s control, and yielded only a modest income at best. If a union contract proved unworkable, he could use the labor problems as an added incentive to sell the DiGiorgio land. Robert DiGiorgio threw down the gauntlet: he called for an election among workers in his grape vineyards.
Chavez had no choice but to accept. He knew the challenge was fraught with problems. Who would be eligible to vote? What were the rules? Who would enforce them? But he had been demanding elections for months, and his supporters would not have understood had he turned down the opportunity.
As Chavez faced the first significant test of his union’s power in the fields, he drew on everything he had learned. Unlike his campaigns in the CSO, he did not have to rely on his relatives, nor did he have to do everything himself. He had a team of savvy, dedicated advisers and dozens of zealous volunteers, including farmworkers, students, nuns, and ministers, eager to carry out any request. And once again, he had the help of “Papa Ross.”
Fred Ross had returned from Syracuse and moved to the Bay Area, where he worked as a consultant for several community organizations. One group had asked him to research Chavez’s death benefit plan, so Ross took the opportunity to visit his old student in Delano a few weeks after the march to Sacramento. Chavez was heading into a meeting with DiGiorgio officials to discuss election protocols, and Ross tagged along. The April 20, 1966, meeting was interrupted by a phone call about a violent confrontation3 on a picket line outside DiGiorgio’s Delano ranch. Chavez and Ross rushed out to investigate.
At the center of the disturbance, crestfallen, stood Ida Cousino. Ross realized they had met a week earlier in Sacramento. Cousino had sought out Ross when he arrived on the final day of the peregrinación and introduced herself. “She wants to be an organizer,”4 Ross had written in his journal. Now he and Chavez found the young woman looking desolate as two farmworkers nursed injuries, one with bad wounds to his head. Cousino had been picketing when Hershel Nuñez, a DiGiorgio security guard, drew his gun and pointed at the picket line. Cousino announced she was making a citizen’s arrest. That brought DiGiorgio managers to the sce
ne. One shoved her roughly out of the way, she fell to the ground, and pickets scrambled to her defense. They tussled with the DiGiorgio supervisors, who struck two workers in the head. Chavez publicly denounced the company and broke off negotiations, then called a meeting for that evening. At the standing-room-only session in the Negro Pentecostal Church, he chastised his members and lectured for almost two hours on the importance of nonviolence: “If we return the growers’ violence5 with our violence, we will lose.” They were only defending the honor of a woman, protested the men, one with a bandage covering ten stitches in his head.
“Through it all, Ida had sat slumped6 down, head bowed and desolate. She looked so pitiful sitting there as the battle roared around her,” Ross wrote. “Sad, I’m sure, that the men who sprang to her aid were being punished, hurt that the brave thing she had done out there in the field had gone unrecognized. I thought I would see her after the meeting and give her a word of cheer. But the moment the meeting was over, she was gone.” Ross found his introduction to the strike dramatic and exhilarating. He decided to stick around for a while, much to Chavez’s delight. He gave instructions to put Ross on the payroll at whatever terms he wanted, a rare order. Ross and Cousino began to spend time together. Soon they were romantically involved, one of many couples who formed in the charged ambiance of the shared fight.
As talks over the terms of the election continued, union organizers worked to get DiGiorgio employees to sign cards pledging support to the National Farm Workers Association. Suddenly they heard a disturbing report: Teamsters were circulating cards in the fields as well. The DiGiorgios had recruited the Teamsters, a scandal-scarred union that had been expelled from the AFL-CIO and had a record of signing contracts that allowed management to retain most of its prerogatives. DiGiorgio supervisors began urging workers to sign Teamster cards.
